Perhaps I lived a blessed student life. I never felt that I had been particularly ill-treated in an examination, though I should add that I have fortunately been spared the trauma of an oral examination, except for matters involving my dental health. I once spoke with Kenneth Arrow, on the day before his 90th birthday, and was surprised to hear just how salient a memory was of an injustice that had been inflicted upon him by John Maurice Clark in an oral examination some seven decades earlier. Apparently Alvin Johnson nursed an analogous decades-long grudge as a result of his oral exam at the hands of the sociologist Franklin Giddings. In his letter to Joseph Dorfman transcribed in this post, we see that he was later able to leverage a poor exam performance of a Giddings’ student into a sweet payback of sorts.
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Letter from Alvin Johnson to Joseph Dorfman
THE NEW SCHOOL
66 West 12th St. New York 11
[Tel.] Oregon 5-2700
August 21, 1951
Dear Joe:
You haven’t answered my query as to whether it wouldn’t suit your purpose better to substitute for the piece I sent you on the School of Political Science my experience of the economics department proper.
I think my second minor was in Constitutional History under Burgess. At my doctor’s exam Burgess asked me three questions, but to be fair he elaborated them so much that he answered them himself, and I had only to nod assent.
Not so with Giddings. He was having a feud with Seligman and set about taking it out of my hide. I had attended a course with him on the English Poor Laws, a course that bored Giddings stiff. He came to my exam with a sheet of details he couldn’t have remembered himself.
“What was the Statute of Laborers? What year of what reign?
“What law was enacted in the third year of Edward VI?
“What was the ‘Speenhamland Act?’ What year of what reign?”
About forty such questions. After I had retired for the Faculty to vote[,] Giddings, who after all was my friend, came out first, slapped me on the back and said:
“Well you passed. But by God, I made you sweat.”
“I’d have made you sweat yourself if I had had the written sheet and you hadn’t loaded up for me.”
“You bet.”
I had my revenge a few months later, when one of Giddings’ protégés came up with a thesis on Puerto Rico. He was a theologue [sic], savagely Protestant, who ascribed all the woes of Puerto Rico to the Catholic Church. His book was full of fishy figures, the worst on the food situation. The Puerto Ricans were starved; they produced practically no food but lived on imported rice, the figures for which the thesis gave. I used my arithmetic and found that the figures gave fifty pounds of rice daily per capita.
“And you say they are underfed,” I added, not very humanely.
When the candidate had retired Goodnow moved, first that the candidate be flunked; second that Giddings be censured for bringing such a fool before the Faculty; third that I be censured for making a Faculty member laugh right out in meeting. All three votes carried.
Sincerely,
[signed]
Alvin Johnson
Dr. Joseph Dorfman
Columbia University
Faculty of Political Science
New York 27, N.Y.
aj:ar
Source: Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections. Joseph Dorfman Collection, Box 13, Folder “C.U. Dept.al history”.
Image Source: From the cover of Alvin S. Johnson’s 1952 autobiography.